Riding the rides for free

Show me a genus of people cooler than carnies and I will straight up button-hook you. Truth is, carnies are the coolest and I don't even want to think about other lifestyles that might rival their majesty.

Carnies, if you don't know (and quite frankly, if you don't know then keep it to yourselves), are carnival workers.

I call carnie a lifestyle because it truly is a decision to go days without bathing, spend over ninety percent of the day shirtless, and be willing to have sex on church grounds. All this while travelling the country, drunkenly allowing our great nation's children access to dangerous rides that are a wiggling, loose screw from falling apart from the inside out.

Nothing, my friends and astute readers, comes close to that.

Hobos? Not a chance. Anyone can hop on a train and steal food. I've never met a hobo, but I'm pretty positive they'd crumble two weeks into being a carnie; it takes a certain unabashed delinquincy to pull off a summer filled with sunburns and unprotected sex on church grounds. It takes finesse.

A roadie? While the showering thing holds up and having a plethora of sexual partners, they get to listen to awesome music and check out hot chicks (*unless it's a Dixie Chicks concert, of course). Roadie and carnie sound alike too, but in no way, shape or form, does a roadie compare to the rigorous chosen lifestyle of the carnie. Hot chicks? The hottest carnie has permanent UTI, four kids with four different guys she works with, has a tattoo of tweety bird on her ankle and drinks scotch straight out of the bottle. She just so happens to work the cotton candy with her bare hands and her name is Doris.

The lifestyle, for the most part, is arcane to most, for the same reason boats don't get any close to icebergs. They see the inherent danger with colliding and decide to stay away.

In years past, I came as close as I ever wanted to carnie folk. I was working at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and went out to collect trash and re-beautify my church's holy ground. That's when I found Kenny Chesny and his soulmate tucked underneath one of our trailers with Coors Lights cans scattered around them like flies on carnies. He was shirtless and very dirty. She was exposed, her farmer jeans somewhere close by.

Hours later I saw the two running the kid's rides, the man still shirtless and very dirty, while his alleged girlfriend and newly acquirer of several vanerial diseases sported a stained halter top.

That day I decided, no matter what I do in life, I'll always be doing alright, so long as I never averted to being a carnie.


Several scattered thoughts that should have been pushed down the garbage disposal had it been working:
1. As I said last night to a friend: "Whatever you end up getting out of your mom's attic, it's not cool."
2. "Life's a catalogue... order it" is my new favorite phrase.
3. How did anyone ever like Big Pun's music? It sounds like he has a mouthful of jujubee's every song.
4. I wonder why we named it hide and go seek instead of skulk and go prowl. Skulk is such a better word than hide.
5. I never thought of chowder as a breakfast food until this morning.
6. Telling people your hard drive crashed is just asking to be pelted with jokes about internet porn. That's the toughest part of having your hard drive crash.